17 ms·
Windows 96
- fosshogg 5y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9zZ4Gj75xs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9zZ4Gj75xs Shouldn't this be playing in the background?
- ekster 5y agoOr perhaps https://youtu.be/OIW4F285QjA https://youtu.be/OIW4F285QjA
- feikname 5y agoIf you click activate windows it says its not a genuine copy, greys out and starts spitting out DLL errors haha, nice easter egg.
- quaintdev 5y ago"Failed to load DLL". You have to click "Damn" to exit dialog box. I wish today's apps made interactions little more fun like this.
- skhr0680 5y agoCute messages are ok sometimes, they’re easy to make aggravating though. Like on Smugmug, which is generally a great product, when you try to delete a photo it has a message like “Do you really want to say good bye to … .jpg” Imagine if that was a photo of your dead grandma or worse
- kortilla 5y agoWhy would you take a picture of your dead grandma?
- zymhan 5y agolol Also, why would you delete a picture of your grandma if she's gone? I think the message would be working well in that case.
- skhr0680 5y agoFor example, if you took a photo of her while she was alive and still want to keep it in an offline backup, but don't want it in your face every time you open up the website.
- skhr0680 5y agoThat's not what I meant, but I knew a guy whose brother couldn't attend their grandma's open casket funeral due to being overseas and took photos there to show him.
- timw4mail 5y agoIt was actually a popular thing early in the days of photography.
- stinos 5y agoPlease no. For me it's fun once, then it starts to get annoying and feels iditoic. I've grown to like my error messages as clear and unambiguous as possible (What is 'damn' going to do? Is it 'ok'? Is it 'cancel'? Is it 'reboot'?). Luckily that one is not a real application. 'guru meditation error' is though. Haha, such fun :]
- pier25 5y agoThese UIs definitely look outdated, but somehow they seem better than current Windows UIs. Not, sure if it's nostalgia or if there's something there.
- Yhippa 5y agoFor some dumb reason I miss the old squared corners
- asddubs 5y agoif you feel that way, you might want to check out the serenityos project. it's a custom unix with a classic windows interface
- Koshkin 5y agoThe worst of both worlds. (I’d prefer Windows with a classic Unix interface.)
- sidpatil 5y agoSo, DOS?
- code_duck 5y agoIf DOS was equivalent to Unix, that sure would have saved some time.
- tibbetts 5y agoYou mean VMS?
- qbasic_forever 5y agoOS/2 warp
- quickthrower2 5y agoRuns two apps at the same time!
- joshuaissac 5y agoThere is also Windows 93: https://www.windows93.net/ https://www.windows93.net/
- pmarreck 5y agoomg, it has a TRACKER! (does anyone else remember .mod files? Predates mp3's?) Fire up "Bananamp"
- nxpnsv 5y agoThe guy who made the page is a talented musician...
- Tepix 5y agoSure, they are still around and you can play them with VLC.
- isodude 5y agoGo crazy: https://milkytracker.org https://milkytracker.org
- Archer6621 5y agoThis is also still alive: https://openmpt.org/ https://openmpt.org/ What I liked most about .mod files is that you could actually open them directly in the editors and see how they were made, quite fun to do that with old games that still used this format (Death Rally, DX-ball 2, Unreal (Tournament)).
- RIMR 5y agoHere's a modern tracker that's really impressive: https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=54515 https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=54515
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- oldstrangers 5y agoHow fun. If you delete the c:/system folder the system gives you a blue screen of death.
- tyingq 5y agoNow I'm curious what this is: https://staging.windows96.net/entry/ https://staging.windows96.net/entry/
- neatze 5y agodid you figure it out ?
- teruakohatu 5y agoI gave it a good try, trying phrases from the Windows 95 launch video, named Start Me Up [1], and from the Rolling Stones [2]. No dice. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0AJM6HMYjM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0AJM6HMYjM [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGyOaCXr8Lw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGyOaCXr8Lw
- Scienceer 5y agohi, this is from someone who has access to this prompt and contact with the site devs, this is actually for testing of prerelease versions of this "WebOS", it's actually something compiled and we test new versions before releasing to the main site
- thirsteh 5y agowow went to package manager, installed Half-Life Uplink, and it's playable.. and a Windows 95 emulator! lol
- nomy99 5y agoSadly doom didn't work. I was able to pick a level but the slayer wasn't moving. Still really impressive.
- stirlo 5y agoDoom worked for me in that I could select the menus, start a new game and move the character around. But it seems the “shoot” button is not working. From googling it seems “shoot” is mapped to the ctrl button which then I assume is not passed through the browser to the emulator :(
- justusthane 5y agoFWIW, Ctrl to shoot worked for me (MacOS, Firefox).
- stirlo 5y agoInteresting. I was using Safari, MacOS11
- Gualdrapo 5y agoAnd it even has a Linux emulator. It says it's running on RISC-V.
- soheil 5y agoSad dir in terminal doesn't work, I had to do ls. How does copyright apply here, surely MS did not approve of this?
- arthurcolle 5y agoHow do I ssh
- blibble 5y agoWindows RG was fun at the time (sadly built using flash so unusable these days)
- plushpuffin 5y agoKitboga is a scam baiter (a guy who messes with phone scammers) on YouTube. He once set Windows RG to fullscreen in a VM and had a Windows tech support scammer connect to it and try to go through his scam script in the Windows RG flash app. https://youtu.be/F0peLpovDB8 https://youtu.be/F0peLpovDB8
- blibble 5y agoabsolutely brilliant thank you for that, it made my day :)
- snarkypixel 5y agoIs it really running Unity in the game?!
- LaserDiscMan 5y agoVery nice work. Not sure if it's the intended behavior, but when opening the start menu if "Programs" is clicked, the start menu closes as if an executable option was chosen instead. Same case for the sub directories under this menu.
- Frost1x 5y agoIsn't that how the menu systems worked, IIRC. You had to painfully mouse over through the menu and sub menus. I feel like if you clicked a high level menu it disappeared. This site is so nostalgic.
- thatwasunusual 5y agoPretty. :) Gives me PTSD-like flashbacks to the time when I was tasked with installing Windows 95 on 50+ computers on the local school. For the young(er), Windows was on 14-ish 3.5" floppy disks, and I had to do some heavy calculation and logistics copying those discs while installing the OS to make my effort as efficient as possible. IIRC, I managed to keep the installing cyclus going on 28 computers at a time, and finished the whole task during a very long Saturday and Sunday.
- qwerty456127 5y agoActually installing Windows 95 on every machine was never really necessary. You could just install it once, configure it and clone the hard drive. Even actual cloning was not necessary - you could just copy the hard drive contents with a reasonable file manager like Total Commander (which was called Windows Commander those days).
- MandieD 5y agoGood luck convincing the nervous principal of a semi-rural Texas high school in 1997 that he should let some teenage girl go at his expensive computer labs with a screwdriver… $6.50/hr rotating diskettes around computer rooms >>> $4.35/hr sweeping hair and cleaning toilets at a beauty shop
- kijin 5y agoI remember those floppies... The 8th disk was kinda finicky on older hardware. I think that's where the installer actually tried to switch from DOS to Windows mode. If it failed for whatever reason, you had to start again from the 1st disk.
- don-code 5y agoFunny.. my least favorite part of floppy installs of Debian is that it had exactly the opposite problem: reading floppies was hit-or-miss until _after_ disk 2 or 3.
- thatwasunusual 5y ago
- simonlc 5y agoThat fucking chat holy hell. Do not let HN members lose like that.
- mweberxyz 5y agoThis is snappier running in my browser than my actual OS shell. Ahh, I miss the simpler days of computing.
- saiya-jin 5y agoIt is way snappier than it was on any hardware back then, windows movements animate much better etc. Those were the times without any GPU help, running it all on some anemic 486 with maybe 16 MB of RAM and super slow and noisy HDDs which swapped constantly.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y agoTurns out that while hardware has become several orders of magnitude more powerful, software has degraded to the point that it makes no real difference.
- Koshkin 5y agoWindows NT 4 was the pinnacle of usability (and sanity).
- ComputerGuru 5y agoNaw. If you used NT4 then you probably used Windows 2000 as well, which was newer but still sane. The actual newest but good (by that same metric) to make it to the shelves was Server 2003, but you had to enable certain desktop features and disable certain server features to get a good workstation configuration.
- pmarreck 5y agoIt all went downhill IMHO after Windows 2000.
- SkyMarshal 5y ago"Internet Exploder", lol. Nice easter egg.
- farrazzyx 5y agotest comment
- actually_a_dog 5y agoFor some reason, I can't get this to load past ">> Mounting C:/ system drive..." on a recent-ish Firefox version. AdBlock Ultimate says it blocks one thing, but, even when I disable it, I still can't load the UI. Works like a charm in Safari, although I am annoyed that Safari won't give me an actual full screen experience without fiddling with some setting I've probably never paid any attention to before ("Always Show Toolbar in Full Screen").
- hoppyhoppy2 5y agoIt's working fine for me on FF90, even with a bunch of adblockers
- floatingatoll 5y agoDouble-click doesn’t work on Safari Mobile, but portrait kind of does.
- brailsafe 5y agoFor realism, you should add much more latency to every interaction.
- slumdev 5y agoJust don't try to activate it!
- fellowniusmonk 5y agoI love the system64.dll in the trash, it's a nice touch.
- AbraKdabra 5y agoHoly shit, you can install and play Doom.
- bshubh 5y agocan you please tell me how can i install Doom?
- floatingatoll 5y agoThe Maximize button works correctly on portrait orientation mobile, even when nothing else is okay with that width. Good game, Maximize button. I concede awesomeness.
- fouc 5y agoIt's got minecraft too? (game named Blocks)
- Scienceer 5y agoyes, full disclosure, it's a clone of minecraft classic with retexturing.
- thdn 5y agoC:/con/con
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- westoncb 5y agoI think this is the nicest one of these I've seen—seems to actually work in a non-superficial way, from the package manager, shell, system settings, chat app, "p3" ("pseudo peer-to-peer"), system backup (downloads filesystem contents as zip), to running Half-life Uplink or Doom. Seems like if you were a deeply unusual person you could actually do some computing in here :) main thing missing is a browser.
- wetpaws 5y agojust noticed ls and cat work in the terminal
- jypepin 5y agosuper well executed! I launched IE and loaded windows96.net!
- rantwasp 5y agothe shell has ls but not dir? faaaake
- SavantIdiot 5y agoIs this an emulator or did someone re-write all of those apps?
- qbasic_forever 5y agoRe-write, it's all just fun modern JS apps made in a style of Windows 95.
- SavantIdiot 5y agoCool! (Nice newsusername. Would have picked "QuickCForever". :)
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- fbueno 5y agoI misss that time of 1. web 2. OS
- qatanah 5y agoLooks cool! Where is my minesweeper and freecell?
- Scienceer 5y agomsgroom is being hit really hard by HN, it's fun to watch lol
- lebrad 5y agoMicrosoft is begging for the next counterfactual Windows version to be Windows 9
- robertwt7 5y agoWell that's fun... and its not built with react!
- citrusui 5y agoNeeds work on mobile. But I'm already having a blast :) reminds me of windows93.net, but with different features
- kowlo 5y agoIt was all fun and games until I ended up on the chat - then someone convinced me I was a bot.
- airstrike 5y agothe chat was the absolute best part. Shoutout to "Elon Musk" and a bunch of other anons who made it feel like the 90s again
- ghostline 5y agoI was Elon Musk lol. Whats up airstrike
- echelon 5y agoA trip down memory lane.
- airstrike 5y agoLOL I was admin/SYSTEM and all the silly names. What's up!
- ghostline 5y agooh you were admin too lol. What's up admin I'm thinking it's a real shame that the internet isn't like that anymore. I've kind of been wanting to build my own forum or something. Maybe bring some of that back
- emi2k01 5y agoThen people found out how to embed images and it was suddenly ruined by porn :(
- airstrike 5y ago:(
- 5y ago
- Apocryphon 5y agoNice, but I'd rather have Windows 95 Mobile. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0DDQumaaCg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0DDQumaaCg
- aasasd 5y agoThat's barely different from ‘Pocket PC’ aka ‘Windows Mobile’ of the mid-2000s. Just more concrete-gray here.
- Apocryphon 5y agoJust having a third major mobile ecosystem attempted by a large tech company again would be significant.
- a-dub 5y agoit's kinda like... ui design fan fiction...
- bdcravens 5y agoWindows 96 was actually a thing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Nashville https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Nashville
- DustinBrett 5y agoNicely done! I'm kinda obsessed with these "Web Desktops" or whatever you wanna call them. I've attempted something similar a few times. Currently working on a year long side project to do something with tons of features that looks like Windows 10. This is a great list of similar projects https://github.com/syxanash/awesome-web-desktops https://github.com/syxanash/awesome-web-desktops. My favorite is probably Windows 93, but this Windows 96 one is in my top 5.
- noipv4 5y agoLol, MIKESOFT. Oh I remember manually configuring my ISA sound card in Windows 95 was a real pain. Plug and play has made things so much easier.
- systematical 5y agoThe startup jingle gave me joy while Start > WTF > YouAreAnIdiot gave me a chuckle.
- _the_inflator 5y agoI found DOSBox inside the terminal - and QBasic in it. OMG! I must put this on hold, otherwise my productivity today is seriously hampered. :D
- jonathanoliver 5y agoWhat? No HyperTerminal? Looks like I'll be forced to run commands from the CLI: echo ATDT > com1
- foysaluix 5y agoMan this album gave me the courage to ask my crush out right before I graduated High School. It made me feel calm enough to give her my number. Turns out she felt the same way! Now I have someone I would never imagine love me so much and it feels wonderful. Thank you Windows96 lol. Much love man
- rukshn 5y agoIn order to view files and folders on Windows it should be dir isn't it? So why is it showing files when you type ls and not dir, and why dir command is not found?
- jjuuaann 5y agoIt's not real Windows 1996.
- apeescape 5y agoNoticed this as well
- dedoussis 5y agoYes I went down the same rabbit hole. `dir` is not found, whereas POSIX commands such as `ls`, `cd` and `cat` are available.
- pcthrowaway 5y agoYou have to open DOSBox (Start>Accessories>Entertainment>Emulators) to use DOS
- progx 5y agoCompare this old simple and easy to use Start-menu with the current overloaded version. No scroll, no keyboard input, just klick open, move over to your app in less then 1 second and done.
- _ZeD_ 5y agowhat? there is "ls" but no "dir" command in the terminal? and what about the "c:/ #" prompt???
- pjmlp 5y agoIt is great, and yet another Chrome only example. On Firefox, indexedDB request error ldb-async.js:25:17 onerror https://windows96.net/system/libraries/kernel/ldb-async.js:25 EDIT: It works on normal windows, it doesn't on incognito mode.
- boudin 5y agoIt's working for me on Firefox (desktop - 90.0.2)
- flemhans 5y agoWorks for me in Safari 14.1.2
- somishere 5y agoWorking for me on Firefox mobile 91
- SSLy 5y agoIt's seems to be on your end, works on FF@WinNT.
- arp242 5y agoFirefox just disables IndexedDB in private mode. It's a Firefox problem, not a problem with the site. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=781982 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=781982 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1639542 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1639542
- pjmlp 5y agoThanks for the bug ids.
- z3t4 5y agoThis thing is blazingly fast, a middle finger to all "modern" UI. Is the source available somewhere?
- yyyk 5y agoMassive regression compared to Windows 95 - there's no minesweeper or freecell.
- valand 5y agoBut you can run doom!
- dmitriid 5y agoAnd Half-Life
- nly 5y agoYou can install Windows 95 from the package manager (runs in dosbox), and both minesweeper and freecell are present.
- yyyk 5y agoMinesweeper and freecell are basic system functionality. Putting these available only via a store^W package manager makes as much sense as replacing the UI with a flat interface suited for tablets and phones. Actually I didn't notice the package manager. It's a bit slow to install, and after installing I get ZIP file error when trying to run dosbox. There are a billion minesweeper clones that likely are trivial to integrate.
- justusthane 5y agoBut it's not a clone of Windows 95; it's its own thing, which I think is kind of the point. Whether or not to include a Minesweeper clone is totally up to the author. The fact that you can run an actual copy of Windows 95 inside it and run Minesweeper there is way more impressive to me (and it worked fine for me, for what it's worth).
- yyyk 5y agoThe entire design and name is retro. Without it, I don't think the HN crowd would have been so enthusiastic. The only really new thing is the package manager, which is another step in running an OS under a browser. * There are existing examples of JS x86 emulation or compiling stuff to WebAssembly, e.g. [0] let you run Windows 2000 in a browser over a decade ago. [0] https://bellard.org/jslinux/ https://bellard.org/jslinux/
- perryizgr8 5y agoWhy does "dir" not work but "ls" does?? Totally ruined immersion for me :( PS: just kidding, amazing project
- Tepix 5y agoFirst thing i did was delete the trashcan. Oops.
- zwaps 5y agoSwitched to the win 2k theme and felt an instant rush of nostalgia. Say what you will, I think that the Win9x UI was fantastic and much better than the Windows 10/11 ones.
- nly 5y agoDid anyone notice you can run the real Windows 95 in dosbox by installing it from the package manager?
- agys 5y agoWhen the Microsoft/Windows mark was still interesting and not just four squares…
- fithisux 5y agoVaporwave.
- yourenotsmart 5y agoThere's some potential in making a web-driven GUI with legit application repository, I can imagine offices using this for real work.
- jhoechtl 5y agoNeedless to say I opened "You are an Idiot". Wow, what a demonstration how far web technology has come.
- tiborsaas 5y agoThe thing that you can install and play Half Life in this is just... wow!
- bshubh 5y agocan you please tell me how can i install Half Life?
- sajithdilshan 5y agoWhere is MS Paint? Windows is not the same without it.
- orhanerday 5y agoNice and smooth love it!
- endlessvoid94 5y agoPackage Manager - Doom - Play - and the cheat codes even work. Unreal!
- leafywashere 5y agoCool, reminds me of windows93.net